Neal Wilson ✅ @neal@social.typica.us

@stux Make sure the broom is ridden properly.

In better news, my sister gave me cake. It was good.

Hopefully this time I won't have to search SEC records for a CEO's home address and send a nasty letter to get them to fix their mistake (yes, I've had to do this and it worked)

I see medical billing in the USA is still as corrupt as the last time I interacted with that. (sending a bill for an amount that whoever chose that price has earned a place in hell for instead of the still egregious but smaller amount that my insurance company says I actually owe)

The receipt says almost everything was on sale, but today's grocery run was too expensive.

My production database has been growing at a very stable rate of about 1GB per year (over the past 20 years). I have some thoughts about ways to shrink that, but will want to do some testing before rolling any such changes out. Realistically the database is already doing some compression so it's unclear if there are gains that are worth it.

Given that I'm just noticing that it's after 2:30AM and I'm hungry, I should be sure to test tonight's code extra carefully (after I get some food and sleep) as I'm not at all confident that it does what I think it does.

It sounds wet outside.

Have you tested your backups lately?

Someone bought the Fyre Festival brand for about $245K. Pretty sure they overpaid by about half a million.

Today's coding was just finding and fixing bugs as well as identifying some features that don't exist but need to.

This morning's coding session was heavy on bit level operations. The hardware documentation is suggestive (without going so far as actually having coding advice) of just using a lookup table for the command strings, but creating these directly by ORing together the right binary literals saves about 60 bytes in executable size and reads a little more clearly to me. (Clearly the engineer who designed the comms protocol thought about this approach and it just wasn''t put in the documentation)

Trying to buy more coffee. There'll have to be a price increase on the next Guatemalan coffee we bring in and part of that is the 10% tariff (which means a more than 10% increase that needs to be passed along since coffee weighs less after I roast it) while another part of that is just that the coffee is more expensive than usual.

Replaced some networking gear at work. Some strange choices for defaults on the new hardware made this take longer than it should have (and the printers needed extra convincing to go along with the change but that one I'm going to blame on the printers).

Got a lot of code written and debugged today. There are a couple tweaks I'd like to try at some point but I'm going to move on to other features first.

Got new bulbs for the can lights in the kitchen. The one by the oven wasn't burnt out yet but the other two have been replaced by brighter, lower power bulbs so I'll be able to see a little better while washing dishes or doing prep.

@stux One of the cats I used to live with liked to pick up and carry a big plushy seal around the house. The stuffed animal was much larger than the cat at the time so depending on the view angle it could look like the seal was moving around the house on its own.

I've known that this was going happen soon, but today I got home from work to discover that the cat has passed away. It looks like she was in a comfortable napping spot when it happened.

Set up a new credit card terminal at the shop. Increasing sliminess and the poor quality of the latest hardware change we were forced into means that we've gone with a different company. Fortunately, we have employees and customers who have experience in their other businesses using this provider because "No Training Required" really means "We can't be bothered to provide comprehensive documentation that might scare people off".

Just about finished with the chunk of code I've been working on lately. Today I worked out a new feature. Not sure if it's how I'll keep things, but I'll live with it as it is for a while and see how that goes.